Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Western economics has become so positivistic that it
has lost sense of ethical values! It considers material things to be more
valuable than humanity so much so that even the human being, let alone produced
goods and services as we know them, has become a commodity!

Think of the slave trade (human trade!). Think of
human labour valued in terms of money (salary, wage, etc.). Why? Because
'greed' and 'selfishness' have been sanctified by the theory and concept of
scarcity! The weak or ‘have-nots’ are told that resources are scarce. This is
to discourage them from claiming them as rights, so that the ‘haves’ can
continue to amass! If resources are scarce, why allow - by the hooks and crooks
of laws and contracts - a few to amass wealth? Indeed, it is the law of greed
at work.

As a result of greed and selfishness being legalized
through those who have the power of property, politics (which gives you power!)
has also become a commodity. Indeed, in Africa the general elections have
become giga-supermarkets where the electoral ballot has become the medium of
exchange. Since the majority of the voters are very poor in their civic
consciousness, they get conned! The politicians buy them off with the political
menu traditionally known as 'election manifesto'! The most traditional
political parties have become corporates, with their chairpersons as CEO's
roaming from one constituency to another shopping for expectations of the
electorates with the currency of promises!

We Africans, have been duped into this shopping game
(that deceives us that we ‘always win'!) –and has shelves that are full of the
so-called 'democratic goodies.' We buy them with our African identity, and have
almost become up-rooted! The best proof for this is the fact that we more often
than not make reference to the wise or philosophers of the West, Greek or not,
and not to our sagacious wise philosophers of the African ancestral schools,
the likes of Shaka Zulu, Mkwawa, Mirambo, Mangi Sina, Lusinde, Mazengo,
Tambaza, Nyerere, Kaunda, Kenyatta, Mandela, Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, and many
others.

We have been made to believe that Western wisdom was
born in the West! The latest historical fundamental theories all point out that
the ancient Greeks got the wisdom from ancient Egypt where science and technology
were so advanced that pyramids could be built with architectural precision
which has never been achieved, per square meter pro rata!!!

The only way out is to inaugurate Africa’s next phase
of liberation after the political one, namely African Economic Liberation
Movement (AFRELIMO). The spirit is now already in the making, it requires
incarnation, whose climax will be the creation of African National Economic
Liberation Committees in each of the 52 countries.

The birth of these Committees should take place in
2017 in Arusha, the Golden Jubilee of the Arusha Declaration, a declaration not
surpassed anywhere in Africa. It is a declaration which fired the political
liberation of all countries in Southern Africa; and is now inspiring some
countries in Latin America.

The time is ripe now in Africa for an
ethic-intellectual revolution! A revolution in terms of critiquing the obsolete
and irrelevant models and paradigms of socioeconomic development. These
paradigms and models have created the monsters we call 'global warming',
'anthropological poverty', 'resources greed', 'economic meltdown', 'capital
flight', 'grand corruption', 'moral decadence', 'weapons of mass destruction',
'cultural commodification', 'neo-colonial democracy', and 'creepy globalization.'
All these monsters are now pestering the continent of Africa because of our
continent's virgin richness of its natural resources, and the African peoples'
generous but naive simplicity!

This ethic-intellectual revolution should begin among
us intellectuals with a vowed commitment. A commitment which is characterized
by the spirit of the African Independence Founding Fathers, namely Kaunda,
Kenyatta, Nyerere, Nkrumah, Mandela, Nasser, Selassie, Mugabe, Obote, Lumumba;
together with the ancestral heroes of the kind of Mkwawa, Shaka, Mirambo, Mangi
Sina, Luthuli, and the rest. Such a spirit was founded on resistance: to resist
any kind or form of degrading, exploiting and raping the African humanity and
its geo-ecological haven on the continent. The intellectuals in Africa should
revive the African critical spirit that was incarnated by the founding fathers
and ancestral heroes through the struggle for the liberation of Africa.

Today, all intellectuals are called upon to make use
of their critical conscientiousness and ethical drive to resist the various
manifestations of the monsters mentioned before. Resistance of these
manifestations means committing oneself and together as a clan of
revolutionaries and shout out the following whenever we are given the opportunity
to speak:

1. We resist the
abusive exercise authority that monopolizes power and prohibits transformation.

2. We resist the
forces that create and perpetuate poverty, ignorance, disease, corruption and
greed or accept these as inevitable or ineradicable.

3. We resist the
denial of rights to any racial, ethnic, caste or indigenous groups, and the
exploitation of women, youth and children.

4. We resist the
structures of patriarchy that perpetuate violence against women and girls;
which exclude their full participation in family and society.

5. We resist
policies that deny freedom of expression; that concentrate the communication
power in the hands of a few.

6.We resist
doctrines of national security based on the use of weapons of mass destruction,
military or biochemical, and self-justified interventions and occupations.

7. We resist the
attitude to nature and creation which treats them only as resources for greedy
economic exploitation.

8. We resist all human greed that makes land a
commodity, which denies the bonds between land, ancestors and people, which
devastates the earth for profit.

9. We resist authority that abuses, violates or
exploits children and young people.

10. We resist all systems and structures that violate
sacred human dignity and rights; that tolerate torture, disappearances,
extra-judicial executions and the death penalty.

Any African intellectual who wants to join this
ethical and intellectual resistance movement must use the following
life-centred criteria to evaluate, critique and reconstruct the social and
institutional arrangements at all levels of decision making and policy
formulation:

1. Equity as basic
fairness that also extends to other forms of life.

2. Accountability as
the structuring of responsibility towards one another and the natural creation
(earth) itself.

3. Participation as the optimal inclusion of all
involved.

4. Sufficiency as a commitment to meet the basic needs
of all life.

5. Subsidiarity as determining the most appropriate
level for decision making while supporting downward distribution of power
relations.

The author cdnkassala2002@yahoo.co.uk is
a Research Fellow, Lecturer and Dean of the Students Eastern Africa Statistical
Training Centre in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

1 comments:

The fact that the writer criticises using Western heroes and then writes in English speaks volumes to me. In Africa, among so-called wazalendo, you are not an intellectual unless you speak the colonisers language well.

Worse still his studies at UDSM are probably funded by aid from some western aid donation fund. This is sickening. 50 years after independence the best we can do is rehash same arguments with the same begging bowl.

Mahali(Location)

Karibu kwenye ulingo wa kutafakari kuhusu tunapotoka,tulipo,tuendako na namna ambavyo tutafika huko tuendako/Welcome to a platform for reflecting on where we are coming from, where we are, where we are going and how we will get there